


In Through The Out Door

by HenryMercury



Category: Supernatural
Genre: Alternate Exile on Main St., Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Dark, Demon Sam, Gen, Psychopathic Tendencies, Sam 'Boy King of Hell' Winchester, Season/Series 06
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-01-27
Updated: 2014-01-27
Packaged: 2018-01-10 05:48:51
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,301
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1155849
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/HenryMercury/pseuds/HenryMercury
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Dean's choking inside his clean-shaven, tracksuited suburban life. After killing a vampire on his neighbour's front lawn, he finally answers the road's call and goes off in search of blood. He's tracking demons in Tennessee when he runs into the very last person he's expecting see alive.</p>
            </blockquote>





	In Through The Out Door

**Author's Note:**

> Title after the Zeppelin record.

It’s been a year since Sam took his swan dive into Lucifer’s cage, and Dean’s jittery as fuck inside his clean-shaven, tracksuited suburban life. He’s been trying, goddamn it he has, but the knowledge that his little brother’s in hell while he’s flipping steaks on the barbecue isn’t exactly conducive to resting easy.

He’d managed this life at first because it was so much of a challenge that it took all his energy, all his weight and willpower to carry through each dinner party or family movie or mow of the lawn. As those things became muscle memory, as automatic and everyday as cleaning a gun, it gave the vibrating restlessness a place to kindle; like routine allowing the mind to wander.

The surplus aggression bottled up inside him. He got into the habit of watching crime shows and horror flicks late at night, not only to make fun of them the way he’d once done, but to satisfy just the tiniest bit of that craving for action and blood and fear. Somewhere along the line, he’d realised that it wasn’t dread that churned in his stomach at the thought of stumbling upon a dead body, or a monster that needed to be killed. No; what shook him was the withdrawal of an addict.

He’d take out the guns and ammo and long, curved machetes in his baby’s trunk where she slept in the garage, run his fingers over them just to remember what it felt like to hold so much force in his hands; to have so much agency and still be swimming for his life. When you’re drowning every breath is a choking, burning miracle. Breathing now is too easy and too simple and he’s never done it this way in his life, wasn’t born or raised to.

He presses the razor-sharp edge of a silver knife into the skin of his arm until the skin breaks. Keeps pressing. Sucks in bright breaths as the pain flares and thinks, with the sudden clarity the rush affords him, that if he doesn’t kill something soon, he might just kill some _one._

Dean hasn’t thanked god for anything in a long time, but he shoots up a silent prayer to whichever entity’s responsible when his crotchety neighbour Mr. Willis is found on his front lawn with his neck half torn out. The vamp is still around, a busty redheaded chick who flirts with Dean right up until the moment he tears a white picket fence paling from the ground, drives it through dead old Mr. Willis’ chest and then straight into the vamp’s. She sinks down into the grass, pales, retches and gnashes her spiny teeth as the poison takes effect.

Dean tries not to grin too hard, tries to keep the exhilarated laughter from bubbling out of him. The neighbours are watching.

“Is she—is it dead?” asks Sid from a distance.

“No, just weakened,” Dean replies, gruff and impatient. There’s no nonsense in this business, and by god, it’s liberating. “Now does anybody have a machete handy, or do I have to run and get mine?”

 

He can’t stop after that, not now that he’s had a taste of the life again, slipped back into it like a hand into a glove. He can stay here and explain to his neighbours why exactly he kills vampires more confidently than he banters about baseball, or he can take his baby out on the road and do what he does best without having to explain shit to anyone. It was fine while it lasted, but Dean’s not going to last another week here.

He’s done his due diligence to Sam’s wishes, tried to live out the kind of happiness his brother had wanted for him... but the truth is Dean’s just not built for happiness. Not this kind. There are things that transcend _happiness_ —the taste of danger, of the chase; the satisfaction of piecing together puzzles and firing guns and stabbing monsters and leaving the people he meets along the way behind him with his taste in their mouths, never sticking around to let it get old. He’s like his baby: designed to keep moving.

Dean says a perfunctory goodbye to Lisa and Ben, doesn’t bother with any of the neighbours. He leaves his hammers and hard hat and civilian toolbox behind, doesn’t bother packing his tracksuit pants or soft sweaters but slings on his weathered brown leather jacket instead—motors off into battle with his armour and his weapons and his shiny black steed.

On his way out of Michigan he takes out the ghost of a woman who keeps trying to kill the wives of dudes who’ve remarried after their first partners died. She screams about as shrilly as any spirit Dean’s ever encountered when he swings at her with an iron rod.

In Ohio, a couple of demons drop in to say hi and he shoots them in their ugly faces.

He calls Bobby and gets a lead on a family of ghouls in Virginia, enjoys stabbing them just as much as they enjoy sticking their fingers into his flesh while he’s temporarily pinned down spreadeagled their dining table. He goes back to his motel room to bandage his torso, downs a generous dose of whiskey, sleeps for a few hours and then continues driving towards Tennessee where a bunch of demonic omens have caught his eye.

He ends up at a bar asking a tall dark-skinned girl questions about the two house fires that have occurred in the area. She’s getting her master’s degree in journalism, and reminds him more than a little of Cassie. They go around the back together and Dean discovers that she doesn’t fuck like Cassie—but then Cassie wouldn’t have sucked him off in an alley beside a dumpster, so the comparison is beyond irrelevant. She gives him her number, which he balls up and tosses before he’s even out the door of the joint.

Dean leaves the bar shortly before midnight and goes straight to the address of a banker named Frederick Rhodes. According to not-Cassie, Freddie’s a pretty wealthy guy who lives in his big shiny house with his shiny car parked out the front and his shiny young wife inside. Both the houses that had burned down around this part of the city had belonged to people who worked closely with Freddie; Marianne Jones and Richard Draper. The three of them pretty much ran the place together, and given the fates the first two met, Freddie’s a shoo-in to be the next target.

Dean picks the lock on the door and goes to disarm the alarm only to find its wires have already been cut. He pulls his gun from the back of his jeans and treads lightly around into what looks like the living room. It’s dark, only illuminated by the motion-sensor lights outside the door he just came through. He can just make out the shadowy outlines of couches, a huge flat screen TV in the corner, a standing lamp with weird tassels dangling from the shade, and—

—and a person. A hulking silhouette that strikes him with a fear entirely unrelated to demons and house fires, though this case has already brought to mind more than enough bad memories of both.

The tasselled lamp flickers on of its own accord.

“Sam?” Dean stares, because thinking he recognises his brother’s profile is one thing, and actually seeing his brother’s entire likeness is another one altogether.

“Hey Dean,” Sam replies easily, and then his eyes flip a black so full it nearly burns to look at. “It’s good to see you.”

“Get out of him, you son of a bitch,” Dean growls, fumbles around in his back pocket for the page where he’d written down his favourite exorcism.

The demon laughs, something eerie and sharp-edged that sits in between Sammy’s old laugh and the way he’d sounded when Lucifer was possessing him.

“There’s nobody else to boot out, Dean. It’s all me in here—one hundred percent Sam, _and_ one hundred percent demon.”

“Liar.”

The demon (Sam?) just smirks at him and continues his spiel; “Ruby, she really was lying when she said she remembered what it was like to be human. Most demons don’t have a clue who they used to be—forgetting is part of what becoming a demon is. But me _..._ Dean, I was always part _this_. I had the foundations in me ever since Azazel first fed me those drops of his blood. I was advanced placement, Dean, something different to the rest of them. I’m still Sam, just... fully realised.”

“You mean _devoid of humanity_ ,” Dean corrects him, channelling disbelief and a strange itching desire to _believe_ into anger, because anger he knows.

“I’m not sure I’d say that,” says Sam. “Demonkind is really just a version of humanity in the first place; one with all the darker, rawer qualities enhanced. You and I, the things we’ve done—we’ve been at least halfway there for a long time and you know it.”

Sam takes a large, too-fast step closer and Dean’s back finds the wall behind him with a crack.

“You know that what scared you most about hell was how much you liked itonce you were finally able to let go, how much of yourself you found there. I didn’t truly understand that at the time—but I do now. We’re finally on the same page, Dean. We’ve given so much already, tried to do the right thing and been torn apart for our trouble, broken down so far that we’re impossible to fix—but what if we don’t have to bother with trying anymore? Let’s not waste so much time answering to our consciences.”

While Dean’s struggling to process all that, it occurs to him to ask what Sam’s actually doing here.

“Are you burning people’s houses down?” he gets out, thankfully not stumbling over the words as much as he could have done.

Sam just nods—and Jesus, he’s definitely changed if this is his new MO.

“They’re not really people, though. The Joneses and the Drapers were both possessed by demons,” Sam elaborates calmly. Too damn calmly. It’s kind of hypnotic.

Dean wonders if the fact that the victims in the case he’s been working have been _demons_ is something that maybe shouldn’t have slipped his notice.

“So if they’re demons, and you’re a demon, how come you’re gankin’ ‘em?”

“They work for Crowley. Bastard thinks he can steal the throne in hell just because Lucifer’s been locked back in the basement.”

“And what, you’re working for Lucifer now?” Dean can feel his face screwing up around the words, but can’t do anything about it. The very idea tastes _bad_.

“ _I_ don’t work for _anybody_ ,” Sam answers smugly. “I’m the one people work for. Remember those demons that talked about me as the Boy King, back when we were still trying to figure out the apocalypse? Well...”

“Jesus Christ, Sam.”

Sam’s smile is at once benevolent and terrifying.  

“Work with me, Dean,” he urges, those old Sammy puppy eyes _almost_ making a reappearance, but not quite. The softness doesn’t occupy his whole face the way it used to. “What I’ve been doing hasn’t been so far off what we’ve always done—travelling, hunting down enemies... You’d enjoy it, Dean. Lots of information to be extracted; all the demonic necks you could possibly snap. I have a whole list.”

“Woah there Dexter,” he says. “What makes you think I want that?”

Sam just looks at him like he’s transparent, like he should know so much better than to even pretend—and Dean supposes that yeah, his little brother does know better than to give any weight to his denial. It’s difficult to reconcile the thing, the demon, standing in front of him with the kid he practically raised—but then it’s hardly _impossible_ to do, which is what it probably should be.

“I could give you a title, let you be lord over whichever circle of hell you choose,” Sam goes on casually, and holy crap, if that isn’t a thing to consider. Dean knows what it’s like to be lord over one little rack, and it’s the kind of drenching heady feeling that melts him down and hardens him up in all the most gratifying ways.

...But it only worked that way when he had no choice but to give in to the animal desires, the desperation; when all the muscle and sinew of his scruples were stripped away by the relentless pain and he was nothing but his cold, tough bones. When he had every excuse to take up the torturer’s blade.

As if he’s reading his mind, Sam raises an eyebrow and adds, “Or I could toss you back in the pit to make your own way, if you’d prefer?”

“No,” says Dean, unsure of whether what he really means is _not yet_.

Suddenly Dean’s flying through the air, slamming up against the opposite wall. He’s about to ask Sam _what the hell_ when he sees that two more figures have joined them in the room; a stumpy greying man and a slim, blonde-haired woman. The woman has one hand extended towards Dean, fingers splayed out. He eyes are roiling black, but Dean’s struck by the thought that next to Sam’s they look kind of grey, kind of washed out and average. The difference between a worn old t-shirt and a robe of velvet.

“Sasha,” Sam says to the woman, voice like shards of steel. He flicks his jaw upwards just minutely, and Freddie coughs out plumes of dull-black smoke. Sam waves a hand idly and the smoke disappears down through the floor, leaving the body of Freddie Rhodes to slump heavily onto the floor.

“Why not kill him?” the demon, Sasha, challenges.

“No need. He was already mine.”

Sasha’s expression slips into disbelief for a moment, and Dean gathers that Sam’s been sneakily accumulating demon followers from Crowley’s ranks. He wonders how many other demons around the place are ‘Sam’s’.

“Now. I’d like you to tell me where your boss is,” Sam twists his wrist and Sasha gasps like she’s being strangled. She falls to her knees and Dean falls back down the wall to the floor as she loses her grip on him.

Sasha spits out a cackle. “Why—” she wheezes, “would I tell _you_.”

Sam shrugs, purses his lips and wrinkles his chin in a gesture that’s always been in his repertoire; a signal saying, _well it’s neither here nor there to me, really_.

“Honestly? Because I’ll get it out of you or someone else along the line regardless of what sort of fight you put up. I’m just offering you a chance to do this the easy way.”

“Not gonna—” Splutter. “—make anything _easy_ for _you_ , Winchester.”

Sam walks closer to her, takes his time, bends down and laughs softly in her face.

“Not easy for _me_ , Sasha. I was actually kind of hoping I’d get to have some fun with you. See my brother here? You know how his reputation precedes him. He may not have picked up a carving knife in a little while but I can _promise_ you he’s still an artist.”

The demon’s attention flickers up towards Dean, and for the first time she regards him like he’s an actual threat. It’s nice to be feared, makes Dean feel a little taller. He gives a silent nod to show he’s more than on board.

“I don’t know,” the demon says. “I don’t know _where_ Crowley is, only what he’s doing.”

Sam raises an eyebrow, a cue to keep going.

“Purgatory,” Sasha hisses. “He’s looking for Purgatory.”

“Purgatory’s a thing?” Dean wonders aloud.

Sam looks less puzzled.

“Monster souls?” he asks, and Dean’s not entirely sure what he means, but whatever. It’s still fun watching this demon quake in her boots. Or her slippers, as the case may be—but whatever. Sam’s clearly hitting some kind of nerve.

“I don’t know what he wants with Purgatory,” replies Sasha.

“Oh, I’m sure you don’t. Not like you’re a part of his inner circle or anything.”

Sasha glares silent daggers.

“ _Certainly_ not like you will be after tonight,” Dean adds.

Sam nods in agreement. “The smart choice would really be to report to _me_ from now on,” he suggests, as though he’s just come to that clever realisation himself.

“And let myself be ruled over by an abomination like you? I’d rather die.”

“Said one demon to the other demon?” Dean raises a curious eyebrow.

Sasha switches her gaze to him again, the eyes of her meat suit keen chocolate brown.

“He isn’t _just_ a demon, _Dean_ ,” she says, baring her teeth in a knowing smirk.

And okay, that’s kind of news to him, but maybe it’s what Sam meant when he said he was more human than the others.

“He shouldn’t even _exist_ ,” says Sasha. “A filthy hybrid of hell _and_ earth _and_ heaven.”

Dean turns to Sam. “Wait, heaven?”

“That’s right,” Sasha taunts. “Freak’s got angel blood.”

“Lucifer,” Sam offers in explanation.  

Dean’s caught off-guard by how much sense that actually makes.

What happens when you throw a human with psychic abilities who may or may not have been preordained as the Boy King of hell, in control of his own mind but also chock full of demon blood _and_ big bad archangel, into the presidential suite downstairs? Nothing normal, obviously.

He turns a calm facade towards Sasha, who’s still struggling against invisible bonds, knees in the shagpile rug. There’s blood dripping out her ears, and Dean wonders what exactly Sam’s doing to her.

“So,” he eyes the demon quizzically, “what you’re saying is, my brother’s such a scary motherfucker you can’t even comprehend his existence—and you still don’t wanna side with him? Sammy, I’m not so sure this chick is the sharpest tool in the shed.”

Sam meets his eye, grins, and it’s like old times; the two of them playing along, bad cop and bad cop. It’s better than anything Dean had ever expected to have again.

“You’re right,” Sam says seriously. “Let’s go, Dean. I’m sorry there was no time for play,” he throws a final glance towards Sasha. “Go ahead, boy.”

Dean doesn’t have time to ask about that last part before the familiar shredding of hellhound claws materialises on Sasha’s skin.

“Holy crap,” he says, hurrying to follow Sam as he strides out of the house. “You have a _hellhound_?”

“Quite a few of them, actually,” Sam says, easy as breathing. “I always did want a dog.”

Dean never thought he’d be laughing about hellhounds after what the bitches had done to him, to Jo, to however many other poor fuckers—but he throws his head back and lets it burst out of him. It’s amazing what you can be accepting of when it’s not fighting you any more, when it has your back instead.

He’s wondered on plenty of occasions whether he should just have embraced this a long time ago. And maybe he could have—but either way, there’s no doubt left now that the time is right. With Sam by his side, equally dark and ravenous, Dean doesn’t think he’ll feel too much like he’s betraying anyone by sinking into it.

This—this could be as close as he gets to reliving that simplicity he’d found down in the pit, where accountability and responsibility weren’t things that mattered because they couldn’t be gripped and used to flay a soul alive, couldn’t save anyone or damn anyone any further than they were damned already. This could be freedom to hunger and hate and draw blood and never look back; the greatest hits of hell on earth. This could be their heaven. 


End file.
